A person’s body waste can say a lot about his or her health. How often you go to the bathroom, and how much waste you expel, can indicate your general digestive health.

‘The digestive tract contains more bacterial cells than there are cells in the entire body,’ said Dr. Jean-Pierre Raufman, a gastroenterologist at University of Maryland School of Medicine. ‘It’s very important that our bowels work well to absorb necessary nutrients but also keep out any foods, chemicals and germs that could do us harm.’

While most people probably don’t want to put much thought into the act of going to the bathroom, it’s an essential body function that can tell them if something is wrong. A change in bowel movements could be due merely to a change in diet, but it could also mean the body is fighting an infection or dealing with a serious condition.

Here are five hints that your body waste could be giving you about your health.

Color

Stool color is often a reflection of what you eat. While various shades of brown are considered normal, some colors like black or yellow are not.

‘Black stool could indicate bleeding in the stomach or the first part of the […]

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GUATEMALA CITY — Guatemala’s Mayan people accused the government and tour groups on Wednesday of perpetuating the myth that their calendar foresees the imminent end of the world for monetary gain.

‘We are speaking out against deceit, lies and twisting of the truth, and turning us into folklore-for-profit. They are not telling the truth about time cycles,

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Picking up on yesterday’s theme, the fiscal cliff, let’s look at the wider context to the argument between left and right over taxes and spending cuts.

There are serious economists who study the difference between what our states pay in taxes and how much they get in return from the U.S. government. These people generally don’t draw political, let along moral, judgments from these numbers.

I’m under no such constraint. The numbers, for decades now, have been quite clear: With some exceptions, what we regard as red states are sent a whole lot more of your hard-earned tax dollars than the traditional blue states. In effect, supposedly indolent, ‘tax and spend

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A bill in the Pennsylvania House proposing the reduction of welfare benefits for low-income women contains a provision requiring a woman who became pregnant from rape to prove that she reported her assault.

As ThinkProgress reported, the measure, proposed by four Republicans and one Democrat, seeks to eliminate an increase in benefits if a child is conceived while a woman is covered under the Temporary Assistance To Needy Family program. A woman can seek an exception to this if the child is conceived as a result of rape. However, she must prove that she reported the incident to the authorities and gave the police her assaulter’s identity. The bill reads:

Elimination of benefits under subsection (d) shall not apply to any child conceived as a result of rape or incest if the department: (1) receives a non-notarized, signed statement from the pregnant woman stating that she was a victim of rape or incest, as the case may be, and that she reported the crime, including the identity of the offender, if known, to a law enforcement agency having the requisite jurisdiction or, in the case of incest where a pregnant minor is the victim, to the county child […]

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After the first presidential debate, opinion polls showed what most ‘analysts’ were also saying: that Mitt Romney had done well, Barack Obama had done poorly, and what had seemed an insuperable Obama lead was shrinking by the day.

Since the second debate, and especially in the past three days, Republican commentators have been saying what the polls are not showing: that Romney has ‘momentum,’ that he’s on an unstoppable roll, that their side is getting ready for an inevitable win. Anyone who has watched Fox, been on Republican email lists, or followed even ‘mainstream’ ‘savvy’ commentary has seen this shift. Michael Tomasky talks about this tone taking over the press ‘narrative’ here.

Meanwhile, this is what the most-frequently-cited poll-of-polls, from Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight, has shown during very same period. Obama’s re-election probability is shown in blue.

The big drop in Obama’s probability-of-win*, from a high of 86% to a low of 61% by Silver’s calculation, came immediately after that first debate. But a week later, that decline stopped — and then reversed, as it has through the subsequent ten days. (Similarly, see Votamatic.org. Eg, ‘The reality in the states – regardless of how close the national polls may make the election seem […]

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